Allusive Tactics: R.H. Horne, Induction, and ‘Desultory Criticism’

Abstract

While twentieth- and twenty-first century scholars have found only limited merit in R.H. Horne’s critical works, a substantial portion surpassed mere summary and evaluation that characterized much of Victorian critical practice. Horne’s work contains an occluded repertoire of critical tactics and a now outmoded but once conventional epistemology. Horne’s criticism was exceptional, then, not for originality or innovation, but for extraordinary representativeness. His New Spirit of the Age marshals the whole catalogue of tropes animating literary criticism in the 1840s. Here and there Horne invokes organic wholeness, aesthetic autonomy, and other figures of depth, but his principal tactics are paradox, especially the idiomatic articulation of “particulars” and “generals” that evoked the aura of induction, and a threefold notion of tact: attention to the physiological feel or impression of a text, investment in a writer’s moral delicacy or decorum, and persistent tangential allusion, habitually “touching upon” without fully elaborating, various topics “suggested” by a text under consideration. Where modern critics produce arguments, Horne and his peers produced tactful, allusive, and “suggestive” descriptions.